OH MY GAWD! OH .. .MY .. . .GAWD!!!! The sky is falling, the sky is
falling .. .. .How could the government let this HAPPEN? Now if we only
souvenired them a couple ten or twenty billion to study it further . . . .

/s/ Chicken Little



"Anonymous" wrote in message
...
Will Compasses Point South?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times
July 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/science/13magn.html

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the
planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in
earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15
percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing
debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic
force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then
reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that
normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of
years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and
satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras
flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory
animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a
navigation aid. But experts said the repercussions would fall short
of catastrophic, despite a few proclamations of doom and sketchy
evidence of past links between field reversals and species
extinctions.

Although a total flip may be hundreds or thousands of years away,
the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already damaging
satellites.

Last month, the European Space Agency approved the world's largest
effort at tracking the field's shifts. A trio of new satellites,
called Swarm, are to monitor the collapsing field with far greater
precision than before and help scientists forecast its prospective
state.

"We want to get some idea of how this would evolve in the near
future, just like people trying to predict the weather," said Dr.
Gauthier Hulot, a French geophysicist working on the satellite plan.
"I'm personally quite convinced we should be able to work out the
first predictions by the end of the mission."

The discipline is one of a number - like high-energy physics and
aspects of space science - where Europeans have recently come from
behind to seize the initiative, dismaying some American experts.

No matter what the new findings, the public has no reason to panic,
scientists say. Even if a flip is imminent, it might take 2,000
years to mature. The last one took place 780,000 years ago, when
Homo erectus was still learning how to make stone tools.

Some experts suggest a reversal is overdue. "The fact that it's
dropping so rapidly gives you pause," said Dr. John A. Tarduno, a
professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester. "It looks
like things we see in computer models of a reversal."

In an interview, Dr. Tarduno put the odds of an impending flip at
more likely than not, adding that some of his colleagues were
placing informal bets on the possibility but realized they would
probably be long gone by the time the picture clarified.

Deep inside the Earth, the magnetic field arises as the fluid core
oozes with hot currents of molten iron and this mechanical energy
gets converted into electromagnetism. It is known as the geodynamo.
In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy
into electricity.

No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses, but
scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the
turbulent flows of molten iron, which they envision as similar to
the churning gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter.

In theory, a reversal could have major effects because over the ages
many aspects of nature and society have come to rely on the field's
steadiness.

When baby loggerhead turtles embark on an 8,000-mile trek around the
Atlantic, they use invisible magnetic clues to check their bearings.
So do salmon and whales, honeybees and homing pigeons, frogs and
Zambian mole rats, scientists have found.

On a planetary scale, the magnetic field helps shield the Earth from
solar winds and storms of deadly particles. Its so-called
magnetosphere extends out 37,000 miles from Earth's sunlit side and
much farther behind the planet, forming a cometlike tail.

Among other things, the field's collapse, scientists say, could let
in bursts of radiation, causing a variety of disruptions.

Dr. Charles H. Jackman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has worked with European
colleagues on a computer model that mimics the repercussions. A weak
field, they reported in December, could let solar storms pummel the
atmosphere with enough radiation to destroy significant amounts of
the ozone that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet light.

Ultraviolet radiation, the short, invisible rays from the sun, can
harm some life forms, depress crop yields and raise cancer rates,
causing skin cancer and cataracts in humans. Dr. Jackman said that
the ozone damage from any one solar storm could heal naturally in
two to three years but that the protective layer would stay
vulnerable to new bursts of radiation as long as the Earth's
magnetic field remained weak.

"It would be significant" in terms of planetary repercussions, he
said in an interview, "but not catastrophic." High levels of
ultraviolet radiation would spread down from polar regions as far
south as Florida.

Like many of the Earth's invisible rhythms, the field reversals are
typically slow, taking anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 years to
complete.

Strong evidence of their reality first emerged in the 1950's and
1960's when scientists towing magnetic sensors behind ships found
that the rocky seabed exhibited odd stripes of magnetization.

It turned out that continuous flows of seabed lava became
alternately magnetized over the ages as the polarities of the
Earth's field switched one way, then the other. The seabed acted
like a huge tape recorder, and the same proved true of the layered
deposits of old volcanoes on land.

How did the rocky memories form? Molten lava proved to hold tiny
mineral grains that acted like innumerable compasses, or miniature
magnets, freely aligning themselves with the contemporary field. But
as the lava cooled, the tiny compasses froze in place, immobile even
if the field shifted. Experts called it paleomagnetism and found
that the tiny compasses were often made of magnetite, a naturally
magnetic mineral.

Paleomagnetic studies showed that the Earth's field reversed every
half million years or so, but in a fairly random way and with early
patterns more chaotic. During the age of dinosaurs, for instance, no
flips occurred for roughly 35 million years.

As scientists began to understand the importance of reversals in the
planet's history, they examined the fossil record for evidence of
damage to life. In 1971, Dr. James D. Hays of the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory of Columbia University noted a strong correlation
between recent flips and species extinctions of tiny marine
creatures known as radiolarians. "The evidence," he wrote in The
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, "is strongly
suggestive that magnetic reversals either directly or indirectly
exert a selective force."

But no consensus ever formed on how the flips might have doomed some
creatures and spared others, and some experts faulted the
correlations as statistically insignificant.

Meanwhile, starting in the late 1970's, scientists began to find
wide evidence that many animals relied on the Earth's magnetic field
for navigation. Dr. Joseph L. Kirschvink of the California Institute
of Technology discovered such reliance in bees, pigeons, bacteria,
salmon, whales and newts, among other animals. The magnetic sense,
he found, usually relies on tiny crystals of magnetite - the same
mineral that gets immobilized in cooling lava.

Investigators looking into the origin of the reversals got new clues
in 1995 when scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and
the University of California at Los Angeles succeeded in making the
first computer simulation of the geodynamo in action, including
field reversals.

Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier, who was one of the Los Alamos scientists,
said it showed that the Earth's solid inner core resisted the
flipping because the field there could not change as rapidly as it
did in the fluid outer core. "The reversal starts with a small
region that gets larger," he said in an interview. "Most of the time
they die away, but other times they continue to grow." To date, the
simulations of millions of years have produced more than a dozen
flips.

The current collapse drew wide scientific attention on April 11,
2002, when Nature, the British journal, published a major paper that
detailed its growing weakness. Dr. Hulot and colleagues at the
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, where he works, as well as
the Danish Space Research Institute, called the large drop
remarkable.

They found it by comparing readings made in 1979 and 1980 by the
American Magsat satellite with measurements by the Danish Oersted
satellite, launched in 1999 and still operating. In particular, Dr.
Hulot and his team discovered a north polar region and a spot below
South Africa where the magnetism is growing extremely weak.

The finding drew wide attention because the magnetic anomalies
seemed consistent with what the computer simulations identified as
the possible beginnings of a flip.

"We postulate," Dr. Hulot and his co-authors wrote, that the new
evidence reflects how "the geodynamo operates before reversing."

In an interview, he said that the field's southern spot was 30
percent weaker than elsewhere and that some satellites passing over
it had already suffered electronic malfunctions when highly charged
particles from the sun were able to penetrate the weakened magnetic
shield.

In March 2003, "The Core," a Hollywood film, gave a wildly
exaggerated portrayal of what would happen if the field vanished.
People with pacemakers fall dead. Pigeons fly into people and
windows. And the planet, a scientist warns, will fry in a year.

Dr. Tarduno said that practical effects on things like satellites
and the ozone layer would be the same no matter whether the field
reversed or simply weakened and bounced back. A major collapse of
the Earth's magnetic shield, he added, could let speeding particles
penetrate deeper into the atmosphere to widely knock out power
grids, as solar storms do occasionally.

The consensus among biologists seems to be that the reversals are
slow enough, and the Earth's creatures resilient enough, that most
would learn to adapt. They note the lack of correlations in the
fossil record between flips and mass extinctions.

Dr. Kenneth J. Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North
Carolina who has pioneered magnetic navigation studies in loggerhead
turtles, said if the field became weak enough "there would be
problems for the turtles." His research suggests they use it not
only for a general sense of direction but as a precise map of their
location.

To better understand the current collapse, the European Space Agency
plans to launch three satellites in 2009. The spacecraft, flying in
polar orbits a few hundred miles up, are to map its intricacies
until perhaps 2015.

Dr. Hulot said scientists would combine the satellite data with
computer simulations to make not only distant forecasts but possible
warnings of current hazards. Among the possible solutions would be
to increase satellite shielding.

"It will be interesting to see what's going to happen in that South
Atlantic anomaly," he said. "If you want to keep satellites flying,
you want to know if the situation is going to deteriorate."

But don't there compasses point . . .. .left?

"Bart Senior" wrote in message
t...
The liberals are already saying Bush lied about it.

Michael wrote

OH MY GAWD! OH .. .MY .. . .GAWD!!!! The sky is falling, the sky is
falling .. .. .How could the government let this HAPPEN? Now if we only
souvenired them a couple ten or twenty billion to study it further . .
..
.

/s/ Chicken Little

"Anonymous" wrote
Will Compasses Point South?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times
July 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/science/13magn.html

Will Compasses Point South?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times
July 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/science/13magn.html

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the
planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in
earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15
percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing
debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic
force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then
reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that
normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of
years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and
satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras
flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory
animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a
navigation aid. But experts said the repercussions would fall short
of catastrophic, despite a few proclamations of doom and sketchy
evidence of past links between field reversals and species
extinctions.

Although a total flip may be hundreds or thousands of years away,
the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already damaging
satellites.

Last month, the European Space Agency approved the world's largest
effort at tracking the field's shifts. A trio of new satellites,
called Swarm, are to monitor the collapsing field with far greater
precision than before and help scientists forecast its prospective
state.

"We want to get some idea of how this would evolve in the near
future, just like people trying to predict the weather," said Dr.
Gauthier Hulot, a French geophysicist working on the satellite plan.
"I'm personally quite convinced we should be able to work out the
first predictions by the end of the mission."

The discipline is one of a number - like high-energy physics and
aspects of space science - where Europeans have recently come from
behind to seize the initiative, dismaying some American experts.

No matter what the new findings, the public has no reason to panic,
scientists say. Even if a flip is imminent, it might take 2,000
years to mature. The last one took place 780,000 years ago, when
Homo erectus was still learning how to make stone tools.

Some experts suggest a reversal is overdue. "The fact that it's
dropping so rapidly gives you pause," said Dr. John A. Tarduno, a
professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester. "It looks
like things we see in computer models of a reversal."

In an interview, Dr. Tarduno put the odds of an impending flip at
more likely than not, adding that some of his colleagues were
placing informal bets on the possibility but realized they would
probably be long gone by the time the picture clarified.

Deep inside the Earth, the magnetic field arises as the fluid core
oozes with hot currents of molten iron and this mechanical energy
gets converted into electromagnetism. It is known as the geodynamo.
In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy
into electricity.

No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses, but
scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the
turbulent flows of molten iron, which they envision as similar to
the churning gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter.

In theory, a reversal could have major effects because over the ages
many aspects of nature and society have come to rely on the field's
steadiness.

When baby loggerhead turtles embark on an 8,000-mile trek around the
Atlantic, they use invisible magnetic clues to check their bearings.
So do salmon and whales, honeybees and homing pigeons, frogs and
Zambian mole rats, scientists have found.

On a planetary scale, the magnetic field helps shield the Earth from
solar winds and storms of deadly particles. Its so-called
magnetosphere extends out 37,000 miles from Earth's sunlit side and
much farther behind the planet, forming a cometlike tail.

Among other things, the field's collapse, scientists say, could let
in bursts of radiation, causing a variety of disruptions.

Dr. Charles H. Jackman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has worked with European
colleagues on a computer model that mimics the repercussions. A weak
field, they reported in December, could let solar storms pummel the
atmosphere with enough radiation to destroy significant amounts of
the ozone that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet light.

Ultraviolet radiation, the short, invisible rays from the sun, can
harm some life forms, depress crop yields and raise cancer rates,
causing skin cancer and cataracts in humans. Dr. Jackman said that
the ozone damage from any one solar storm could heal naturally in
two to three years but that the protective layer would stay
vulnerable to new bursts of radiation as long as the Earth's
magnetic field remained weak.

"It would be significant" in terms of planetary repercussions, he
said in an interview, "but not catastrophic." High levels of
ultraviolet radiation would spread down from polar regions as far
south as Florida.

Like many of the Earth's invisible rhythms, the field reversals are
typically slow, taking anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 years to
complete.

Strong evidence of their reality first emerged in the 1950's and
1960's when scientists towing magnetic sensors behind ships found
that the rocky seabed exhibited odd stripes of magnetization.

It turned out that continuous flows of seabed lava became
alternately magnetized over the ages as the polarities of the
Earth's field switched one way, then the other. The seabed acted
like a huge tape recorder, and the same proved true of the layered
deposits of old volcanoes on land.

How did the rocky memories form? Molten lava proved to hold tiny
mineral grains that acted like innumerable compasses, or miniature
magnets, freely aligning themselves with the contemporary field. But
as the lava cooled, the tiny compasses froze in place, immobile even
if the field shifted. Experts called it paleomagnetism and found
that the tiny compasses were often made of magnetite, a naturally
magnetic mineral.

Paleomagnetic studies showed that the Earth's field reversed every
half million years or so, but in a fairly random way and with early
patterns more chaotic. During the age of dinosaurs, for instance, no
flips occurred for roughly 35 million years.

As scientists began to understand the importance of reversals in the
planet's history, they examined the fossil record for evidence of
damage to life. In 1971, Dr. James D. Hays of the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory of Columbia University noted a strong correlation
between recent flips and species extinctions of tiny marine
creatures known as radiolarians. "The evidence," he wrote in The
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, "is strongly
suggestive that magnetic reversals either directly or indirectly
exert a selective force."

But no consensus ever formed on how the flips might have doomed some
creatures and spared others, and some experts faulted the
correlations as statistically insignificant.

Meanwhile, starting in the late 1970's, scientists began to find
wide evidence that many animals relied on the Earth's magnetic field
for navigation. Dr. Joseph L. Kirschvink of the California Institute
of Technology discovered such reliance in bees, pigeons, bacteria,
salmon, whales and newts, among other animals. The magnetic sense,
he found, usually relies on tiny crystals of magnetite - the same
mineral that gets immobilized in cooling lava.

Investigators looking into the origin of the reversals got new clues
in 1995 when scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and
the University of California at Los Angeles succeeded in making the
first computer simulation of the geodynamo in action, including
field reversals.

Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier, who was one of the Los Alamos scientists,
said it showed that the Earth's solid inner core resisted the
flipping because the field there could not change as rapidly as it
did in the fluid outer core. "The reversal starts with a small
region that gets larger," he said in an interview. "Most of the time
they die away, but other times they continue to grow." To date, the
simulations of millions of years have produced more than a dozen
flips.

The current collapse drew wide scientific attention on April 11,
2002, when Nature, the British journal, published a major paper that
detailed its growing weakness. Dr. Hulot and colleagues at the
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, where he works, as well as
the Danish Space Research Institute, called the large drop
remarkable.

They found it by comparing readings made in 1979 and 1980 by the
American Magsat satellite with measurements by the Danish Oersted
satellite, launched in 1999 and still operating. In particular, Dr.
Hulot and his team discovered a north polar region and a spot below
South Africa where the magnetism is growing extremely weak.

The finding drew wide attention because the magnetic anomalies
seemed consistent with what the computer simulations identified as
the possible beginnings of a flip.

"We postulate," Dr. Hulot and his co-authors wrote, that the new
evidence reflects how "the geodynamo operates before reversing."

In an interview, he said that the field's southern spot was 30
percent weaker than elsewhere and that some satellites passing over
it had already suffered electronic malfunctions when highly charged
particles from the sun were able to penetrate the weakened magnetic
shield.

In March 2003, "The Core," a Hollywood film, gave a wildly
exaggerated portrayal of what would happen if the field vanished.
People with pacemakers fall dead. Pigeons fly into people and
windows. And the planet, a scientist warns, will fry in a year.

Dr. Tarduno said that practical effects on things like satellites
and the ozone layer would be the same no matter whether the field
reversed or simply weakened and bounced back. A major collapse of
the Earth's magnetic shield, he added, could let speeding particles
penetrate deeper into the atmosphere to widely knock out power
grids, as solar storms do occasionally.

The consensus among biologists seems to be that the reversals are
slow enough, and the Earth's creatures resilient enough, that most
would learn to adapt. They note the lack of correlations in the
fossil record between flips and mass extinctions.

Dr. Kenneth J. Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North
Carolina who has pioneered magnetic navigation studies in loggerhead
turtles, said if the field became weak enough "there would be
problems for the turtles." His research suggests they use it not
only for a general sense of direction but as a precise map of their
location.

To better understand the current collapse, the European Space Agency
plans to launch three satellites in 2009. The spacecraft, flying in
polar orbits a few hundred miles up, are to map its intricacies
until perhaps 2015.

Dr. Hulot said scientists would combine the satellite data with
computer simulations to make not only distant forecasts but possible
warnings of current hazards. Among the possible solutions would be
to increase satellite shielding.

"It will be interesting to see what's going to happen in that South
Atlantic anomaly," he said. "If you want to keep satellites flying,
you want to know if the situation is going to deteriorate."

...."Eastward he sailed, into the setting sun."

Michael wrote:

OH MY GAWD! OH .. .MY .. . .GAWD!!!! The sky is falling, the sky is
falling .. .. .How could the government let this HAPPEN? Now if we only
souvenired them a couple ten or twenty billion to study it further . . . .

/s/ Chicken Little

"Anonymous" wrote in message
...
Will Compasses Point South?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times
July 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/science/13magn.html

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the
planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in
earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15
percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing
debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic
force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then
reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that
normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of
years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and
satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras
flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory
animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a
navigation aid. But experts said the repercussions would fall short
of catastrophic, despite a few proclamations of doom and sketchy
evidence of past links between field reversals and species
extinctions.

Although a total flip may be hundreds or thousands of years away,
the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already damaging
satellites.

Last month, the European Space Agency approved the world's largest
effort at tracking the field's shifts. A trio of new satellites,
called Swarm, are to monitor the collapsing field with far greater
precision than before and help scientists forecast its prospective
state.

"We want to get some idea of how this would evolve in the near
future, just like people trying to predict the weather," said Dr.
Gauthier Hulot, a French geophysicist working on the satellite plan.
"I'm personally quite convinced we should be able to work out the
first predictions by the end of the mission."

The discipline is one of a number - like high-energy physics and
aspects of space science - where Europeans have recently come from
behind to seize the initiative, dismaying some American experts.

No matter what the new findings, the public has no reason to panic,
scientists say. Even if a flip is imminent, it might take 2,000
years to mature. The last one took place 780,000 years ago, when
Homo erectus was still learning how to make stone tools.

Some experts suggest a reversal is overdue. "The fact that it's
dropping so rapidly gives you pause," said Dr. John A. Tarduno, a
professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester. "It looks
like things we see in computer models of a reversal."

In an interview, Dr. Tarduno put the odds of an impending flip at
more likely than not, adding that some of his colleagues were
placing informal bets on the possibility but realized they would
probably be long gone by the time the picture clarified.

Deep inside the Earth, the magnetic field arises as the fluid core
oozes with hot currents of molten iron and this mechanical energy
gets converted into electromagnetism. It is known as the geodynamo.
In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy
into electricity.

No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses, but
scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the
turbulent flows of molten iron, which they envision as similar to
the churning gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter.

In theory, a reversal could have major effects because over the ages
many aspects of nature and society have come to rely on the field's
steadiness.

When baby loggerhead turtles embark on an 8,000-mile trek around the
Atlantic, they use invisible magnetic clues to check their bearings.
So do salmon and whales, honeybees and homing pigeons, frogs and
Zambian mole rats, scientists have found.

On a planetary scale, the magnetic field helps shield the Earth from
solar winds and storms of deadly particles. Its so-called
magnetosphere extends out 37,000 miles from Earth's sunlit side and
much farther behind the planet, forming a cometlike tail.

Among other things, the field's collapse, scientists say, could let
in bursts of radiation, causing a variety of disruptions.

Dr. Charles H. Jackman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has worked with European
colleagues on a computer model that mimics the repercussions. A weak
field, they reported in December, could let solar storms pummel the
atmosphere with enough radiation to destroy significant amounts of
the ozone that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet light.

Ultraviolet radiation, the short, invisible rays from the sun, can
harm some life forms, depress crop yields and raise cancer rates,
causing skin cancer and cataracts in humans. Dr. Jackman said that
the ozone damage from any one solar storm could heal naturally in
two to three years but that the protective layer would stay
vulnerable to new bursts of radiation as long as the Earth's
magnetic field remained weak.

"It would be significant" in terms of planetary repercussions, he
said in an interview, "but not catastrophic." High levels of
ultraviolet radiation would spread down from polar regions as far
south as Florida.

Like many of the Earth's invisible rhythms, the field reversals are
typically slow, taking anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 years to
complete.

Strong evidence of their reality first emerged in the 1950's and
1960's when scientists towing magnetic sensors behind ships found
that the rocky seabed exhibited odd stripes of magnetization.

It turned out that continuous flows of seabed lava became
alternately magnetized over the ages as the polarities of the
Earth's field switched one way, then the other. The seabed acted
like a huge tape recorder, and the same proved true of the layered
deposits of old volcanoes on land.

How did the rocky memories form? Molten lava proved to hold tiny
mineral grains that acted like innumerable compasses, or miniature
magnets, freely aligning themselves with the contemporary field. But
as the lava cooled, the tiny compasses froze in place, immobile even
if the field shifted. Experts called it paleomagnetism and found
that the tiny compasses were often made of magnetite, a naturally
magnetic mineral.

Paleomagnetic studies showed that the Earth's field reversed every
half million years or so, but in a fairly random way and with early
patterns more chaotic. During the age of dinosaurs, for instance, no
flips occurred for roughly 35 million years.

As scientists began to understand the importance of reversals in the
planet's history, they examined the fossil record for evidence of
damage to life. In 1971, Dr. James D. Hays of the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory of Columbia University noted a strong correlation
between recent flips and species extinctions of tiny marine
creatures known as radiolarians. "The evidence," he wrote in The
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, "is strongly
suggestive that magnetic reversals either directly or indirectly
exert a selective force."

But no consensus ever formed on how the flips might have doomed some
creatures and spared others, and some experts faulted the
correlations as statistically insignificant.

Meanwhile, starting in the late 1970's, scientists began to find
wide evidence that many animals relied on the Earth's magnetic field
for navigation. Dr. Joseph L. Kirschvink of the California Institute
of Technology discovered such reliance in bees, pigeons, bacteria,
salmon, whales and newts, among other animals. The magnetic sense,
he found, usually relies on tiny crystals of magnetite - the same
mineral that gets immobilized in cooling lava.

Investigators looking into the origin of the reversals got new clues
in 1995 when scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and
the University of California at Los Angeles succeeded in making the
first computer simulation of the geodynamo in action, including
field reversals.

Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier, who was one of the Los Alamos scientists,
said it showed that the Earth's solid inner core resisted the
flipping because the field there could not change as rapidly as it
did in the fluid outer core. "The reversal starts with a small
region that gets larger," he said in an interview. "Most of the time
they die away, but other times they continue to grow." To date, the
simulations of millions of years have produced more than a dozen
flips.

The current collapse drew wide scientific attention on April 11,
2002, when Nature, the British journal, published a major paper that
detailed its growing weakness. Dr. Hulot and colleagues at the
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, where he works, as well as
the Danish Space Research Institute, called the large drop
remarkable.

They found it by comparing readings made in 1979 and 1980 by the
American Magsat satellite with measurements by the Danish Oersted
satellite, launched in 1999 and still operating. In particular, Dr.
Hulot and his team discovered a north polar region and a spot below
South Africa where the magnetism is growing extremely weak.

The finding drew wide attention because the magnetic anomalies
seemed consistent with what the computer simulations identified as
the possible beginnings of a flip.

"We postulate," Dr. Hulot and his co-authors wrote, that the new
evidence reflects how "the geodynamo operates before reversing."

In an interview, he said that the field's southern spot was 30
percent weaker than elsewhere and that some satellites passing over
it had already suffered electronic malfunctions when highly charged
particles from the sun were able to penetrate the weakened magnetic
shield.

In March 2003, "The Core," a Hollywood film, gave a wildly
exaggerated portrayal of what would happen if the field vanished.
People with pacemakers fall dead. Pigeons fly into people and
windows. And the planet, a scientist warns, will fry in a year.

Dr. Tarduno said that practical effects on things like satellites
and the ozone layer would be the same no matter whether the field
reversed or simply weakened and bounced back. A major collapse of
the Earth's magnetic shield, he added, could let speeding particles
penetrate deeper into the atmosphere to widely knock out power
grids, as solar storms do occasionally.

The consensus among biologists seems to be that the reversals are
slow enough, and the Earth's creatures resilient enough, that most
would learn to adapt. They note the lack of correlations in the
fossil record between flips and mass extinctions.

Dr. Kenneth J. Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North
Carolina who has pioneered magnetic navigation studies in loggerhead
turtles, said if the field became weak enough "there would be
problems for the turtles." His research suggests they use it not
only for a general sense of direction but as a precise map of their
location.

To better understand the current collapse, the European Space Agency
plans to launch three satellites in 2009. The spacecraft, flying in
polar orbits a few hundred miles up, are to map its intricacies
until perhaps 2015.

Dr. Hulot said scientists would combine the satellite data with
computer simulations to make not only distant forecasts but possible
warnings of current hazards. Among the possible solutions would be
to increase satellite shielding.

"It will be interesting to see what's going to happen in that South
Atlantic anomaly," he said. "If you want to keep satellites flying,
you want to know if the situation is going to deteriorate."



--
Flying Tadpole

-------------------------
Learn what lies below the waves of cyberspace!
http://music.download.com/internetopera
http://www.internetopera.netfirms.com

The liberals are already saying Bush lied about it.

Michael wrote

OH MY GAWD! OH .. .MY .. . .GAWD!!!! The sky is falling, the sky is
falling .. .. .How could the government let this HAPPEN? Now if we only
souvenired them a couple ten or twenty billion to study it further . . .
..

/s/ Chicken Little

"Anonymous" wrote
Will Compasses Point South?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
New York Times
July 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/science/13magn.html

PRAY! PRAY! We're all going to die!!!!! Why is God doing this to
us!?!?!?!?!?

--
katysails
s/v Chanteuse
Kirie Elite 32
http://katysails.tripod.com

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax
and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein



---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.712 / Virus Database: 468 - Release Date: 6/27/2004

NOTE THE HIGH CORRELATION:

DECREASE IN MAGNETIC FIELD --- GLOBAL WARMING

Nah...they'd rather b%#ch about it being mankind's fault....

--
katysails
s/v Chanteuse
Kirie Elite 32
http://katysails.tripod.com

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax
and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein



---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.712 / Virus Database: 468 - Release Date: 6/27/2004

NOTE THE HIGH CORRELATION:

DECREASE IN MAGNETIC FIELD --- GLOBAL WARMING

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:45:41 -0400, "katysails"
wrote this crap:

PRAY! PRAY! We're all going to die!!!!! Why is God doing this to
us!?!?!?!?!?


It's Clinton's fault.





Pathetic Earthlings! No one can save you now!

Which one?

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Horvath" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:45:41 -0400, "katysails"
wrote this crap:

PRAY! PRAY! We're all going to die!!!!! Why is God doing this to
us!?!?!?!?!?


It's Clinton's fault.





Pathetic Earthlings! No one can save you now!